CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Komal Misra, a software engineer turned asset manager, decided that it was time once again to make a career change, she found herself staring at a computer screen filled with stocks from various portfolios that were being traded based not on business fundamentals but larger macro-driven trends.

“It got me to thinking: Here I had invested so much time in understanding these businesses and why they were good or great investments, but none of it mattered in that place in time when things were just selling up,” recalls Komal, who adds that she began thinking about her career as if it were a company stock that over time would be propelled or impeded due to macro-driven trends.

According to Misra, “I started with a top-down approach to consider what my options were within business—in just the same way that I would’ve analyzed any stock investment. This led me to the conclusion that in the long run, if I wanted another 10- or 15-year career, I really should be thinking about transitioning to something that had a lot more staying power than what I was doing at that time. “

For Misra, who had spent the previous 15 years as a tech sector portfolio manager, the move to corporate finance was not triggered by ambitions to someday be a CFO. Instead, she tells us, she knew that management teams were seeking to add senior finance executives who could help to propel traditional finance teams into the realm of strategic finance.

Misra would join technology services company Cognizant as a vice president of finance and eventually oversee the company’s corporate development.  

“Cognizant is where I learned the inner workings of a large, mega-cap company from a finance team point of view,” comments Misra, who a few years later would enter the CFO office at Internet service provider Starry, Inc.

Looking back, Misra says that it was not so much the CFO role as the opportunities that the role has afforded her that led her into the C-suite.    

Says Misra: “I was very willing to take on risks in life and see where things led me and not be afraid to fail, because from my point of view, whether I became a CFO or not didn’t matter—what mattered was that I was doing something interesting.” –Jack Sweeney 

A dozen years ago, if you had told Ryan Gwillim that within the next decade he would be named CFO of the Brunswick Corporation, he may have laughed. At the time, he was an associate with law firm Baker & McKenzie who was spending his days traveling the globe to advise legal clients as an M&A transaction guru.

However, over the next decade, Gwillim and Brunswick would together find a common groove as each embarked on a journey of transformation. For Brunswick—a 155-year-old conglomerate—the evolutionary arc would trigger a flurry of historic M&A activity that included the sale of its marquee bowling center business (2014) while at the same time advancing its steady stroke into marine products. For Gwillim, the transformation chapter would put an end to his vagabond existence while landing the seasoned M&A attorney inside Brunswick’s corporate counsel office in 2012.

It would be little more than 5 years later, after a steady progression of internal M&A projects, that Gwillim would be asked by Brunswick’s CFO to step into the role of vice president of investor relations.  

“From September 2017 to about the summer of 2019 was one of the most volatile times in Brunswick’s history, and here I was, along with the management team, becoming the face of storytelling for the investment community,” explains Gwillim, who characterizes the period as one when Brunswick once-and-for-all “closed the books on its conglomerate viewpoint.”

Determined to focus investor attention on the company’s promising future in marine technology products, Brunswick accelerated efforts to jettison businesses procured during its conglomerate years, such as a struggling fitness operation that had been undermining investor confidence in the company.

Along the way, Gwillim would become a primary driver of the Brunswick transformation as he helped to manage investor expectations as well as the financial levers that would allow the company to find its footing while opening its post-conglomerate chapter.   

As it turned out, the beginning of Brunswick’s post-conglomerate life coincided with the completion of the seasoned-M&A-attorney-turned-IR-executive’s own transformation chapter. Appointed as Brunswick’s vice president of finance and treasurer in 2019, Gwillim would be named Brunswick CFO only a year later.  

“We are completely different from what we were 10 or 15 years ago,” reports Gwillim, sharing a thought that one could argue applies to the CFO as well as to the company. –Jack Sweeney

Among the many acquisitions with which Marc Levine became involved during his 25 years at Hewlett-Packard Co., it may surprise few of his former colleagues that he counts HP’s purchase of Compaq Computer as one of the tech giant’s most unusual marriages.    

However, Levine doesn’t single out HP’s purchase of Compaq due to the lively behind-the-scenes drama that accompanied it after Walter Hewlett, son of one of the HP founders, loudly voiced his opposition to the deal or the two books that a subsequent proxy battle helped to fatten.

Instead, Levine tells us that from his perspective, the unusual aspect of the Compaq acquisition had more to do with the integration of certain pieces of the business.

“On my particular team, I was the only person from HP, which was unlike in any of the other HP integrations I had previously been involved with, where there had always been more HP people,” explains Levine, who recalls spending many a night in Houston, Texas, hotel rooms beside Compaq’s headquarters.

Looking back, Levine suspects that the lack of HP representation on his team had to do with his group’s focus on the integration of Compaq’s sales team and field organization. Having in the past worked closely with the HP sales team (including a stint as a sales leader in HP’s Southeast Asia operations), Levine was perhaps better prepared than many of his HP peers to join the integration effort.

Says Levine: “I think that past experience brought me a little more credibility when I walked into the room, and I could understand better some of the things that the Compaq people were dealing with.”

Still, while HP was widely known as an engineering organization rich with technical talent, Compaq was known for having a dynamic sales organization—a standout attribute that may have led the acquiring company to give Compaq greater influence than in other deals when it came to integrating sales talent.  

Adds Levine: “It was the biggest and probably the first acquisition that I became involved with at HP. There was a lot of controversy at the time as to whether it was the right move for HP, but the integration was really about making certain that we could bring together the best of both companies.”  –Jack Sweeney

It was not long after Chris Greiner became CFO of IBM’s fast-growing Analytics Division that the gravitational pull that IBM had maintained on Greiner’s finance career-building began to give way.

While his new divisional CFO title more than validated his 7-year career investment with the company, Greiner—like many divisional finance chiefs—discovered the next rung of the company’s finance career ladder becoming increasingly obscured from view.  

Meanwhile, his divisional CFO role afforded him a wider view into IBM’s business development as he sat across the table from different owners of middle-market companies.   

“What I saw was companies that were 200 to 400 employees in size, with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, that were being successful at disrupting markets, and I knew then that I wanted to be on the other side of the table one day,” recalls Greiner, who notes that the experience of dealing with business leaders intent on disrupting the market led him to his revise his career-building agenda.

Says Greiner: “I knew that for me to get the experiences I wanted to get, I needed to take a leap.”

One of those experiences, Greiner reports, had to do with talent development in midsize firms versus that at large enterprise companies like IBM.

“At IBM, you can’t empty the tank when it comes to talent because there is always another person looking to step in to fill a role when someone leaves,” observes Greiner, who points out that talent development in midsize companies is not always as robust.

“That muscle for developing talent within an organization needs to be worked on,” comments Greiner, who found that his menu of responsibilities inside midsize firms also became more fluid.  

Adds Greiner: “Another eye-opener for me—post-IBM —was how I needed to invest a disproportionate amount of time on the organization itself.” –Jack Sweeney

When Al Farrell tells us that finance leaders must never lose sight of the value of a business asset, as well as acquire a strong understanding of how to optimize the returns on it, we sense his frustration.

This is not because he’s relating a situation in which management failed both to properly value an asset (which, Farrell tells us, was worth nearly $650 million) and to optimize the asset’s returns (which ended up being increased by 12 percent).

Instead, Farrell’s angst was due to the fact that management’s asset utilization improvement feat was achieved on the eve of COVID-19’s arrival in the U.S., and the asset that was so adroitly leveraged to pump up returns was none other than a fleet of rental cars some 35,000 vehicles strong.

Certainly, few industries were hit harder by COVID’s arrival than car rentals, and as car rental businesses go, few suffered a more direct hit than Advantage Rent A Car, where Farrell occupied the CFO office from 2016 to early 2022.  

“The car rental business is like the airlines because it requires a great deal of capital investment—but unlike with the airlines, you don’t have a firm reservation and people generally don’t prepay,” explains Farrell, who notes that in early 2020, after the U.S. announced a travel ban in response to COVID, Advantage’s reservation snag was in full view.  

“That’s when 96 percent of our reservations went up in smoke,” recalls Farrell, who reports that prior to the travel ban, Advantage’s growing utilization rates had begun to increase the prospects for selling the company.

Says Farrell: “Unfortunately, we didn’t come out with the outcome that we wanted, but had COVID not hit, I think that we would have had the very successful sale of a business that was significantly more productive and lucrative than it was when we started out.” –Jack Sweeney 

Back in April of 2020, as the consequences of COVID’s arrival in the U.S. sent financial markets reeling, Paychex CFO Efrain Rivera had the temptation “to say nothing.”

As the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts quickly approached, Rivera explains, a number of executive team members had gathered in conference to debate the idea of halting any future guidance in light of things being just so uncertain.

“The problem was that we did have data!,” explains Rivera, referring to Paychex’s unique lines of sight into the payroll practices of thousands of middle-market businesses.

The subsequent earnings call was unusual for its length (2 hours) as well as the general nature of the discussion, recalls Rivera.   

“Half of the analyst questions were really about the general economy and what we were seeing because they knew that we had unique insights into employees,” remarks Rivera, who notes that the prior debate ended with those lobbying for “more guidance” scoring the win.

Rivera adds that the prevailing point of view became, “We need to say what we know, and we need to say, ‘This is the limit of what we know.’”

Weeks later, when Paychex found it necessary to revise some of the guidance that it had provided on the Spring 2020 call, there was no double-guessing of the earlier debate’s outcome.

Says Rivera: “To this day, we still get credit for having said what we said and shared what we shared at a moment when people were very concerned about saying anything.” –Jack Sweeney

Steve and Jack talk about the volatile business environment and what it means for business planning professionals. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, CFO Adam Ante of Paycor, CFO Ryan Van Hatten of Prophix and CFO Steve Vintz of Tenable.

When Mike Catelani seeks to identify the objectives and career milestones that have helped to advance him into the ranks of Bay Area biotech CFOs, he mentions that although he had a deep interest in biology during his high school years, upon entering college he decided to swap out a biology curriculum for an accounting one.

More than a decade later, Catelani decided to make a career “lane change” to accept a CFO role for a manufacturer of instruments and tools used in drug discovery.

While the company, whose stock was traded on the ASX (Australian Securities Exchange), was not directly involved in drug discovery, Catelani believed that the CFO stint would put him one step closer to opportunities inside the biotech realm.

Still, he can’t help but marvel at the randomness of the circumstances that ultimately opened the biotech door.

“It was complete dumb luck: A recruiter was looking for a CFO who had Australian Securities Exchange experience for a biotech firm in the Bay Area, and—not surprisingly—mine was like the only name that popped up,” explains Catelani, who was named CFO of Benitec, an Australian public company that at the time specialized in drug development for hepatitis C and HIV.

Seventeen years and multiple biotech chapters later, Catelani looks back on his original door of entry as “a bit of a turnaround.”

“It had roughly 6 weeks of cash when I came on board and at the time was involved in a number of patent infringement lawsuits,” reports Catelani, who lists cash management as every biotech CFO’s mission-critical skillset tool. –Jack Sweeney

Perhaps few CFO career paths better reveal the advantages a founder-led firm may offer career-minded executives than that of Prophix CFO Ryan Van Hatten.

Back in 2016—when the firm’s previous CFO exited the company—Prophix’s founder and CEO, the late Paul Barber, asked Van Hatten, an 11-year company veteran, to step into the CFO office until a CFO hire could be made.

Recalls Van Hatten: “I knew all of the people on the finance team, and they knew me, and we respected each other, so it was like, ‘Calm the troops, assess where we’re at, and while this may take a few months, you can then go home to operations.’”    

However, Van Hatten never did return to operations, and his ascension into the CFO role was finally set after Barber sold the software company to Canadian private equity firm HG Capital in early 2021.  

Comments Van Hatten: “I was suddenly thrust into a different world. It was very different from having Paul and a bunch of friendly managers asking the questions.”

Still, few CFOs likely would have been better prepared to answer sticky operational questions than Van Hatten, who had spent the balance of his 16-plus years at the software company zigzagging across the organization as Barber and COO Alok Ajmera (now CEO) summoned him to take on new and different roles.     

Reports Van Hatten: “I had been around the company a long time. I knew the people, and if I had fallen flat on my face, they would have been there to help me and pick me up.”

Asked what advantages a founder-led firm might offer to aspiring CFOs and what exactly sets apart the company that Paul Barber founded, Van Hatten says that this comes down to learning and relationships: “It’s having the openness to learn from each other.” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss how growing numbers of businesses are facing an employee retention crisis as they battle escalating workforce attrition and struggle to fill job vacancies. As the crisis grows in certain industries, more finance leaders are sounding the alarm on escalating business risk and dedicating more time to solving the current talent equation.

Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Efrain Rivera of Paychex, CFO Anisha Sood of First Choice Health, CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, and CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse.